Word: della
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...forms that the U.S. has contributed to Western civilization have been largely architectural: skyscrapers, grain silos, factories, petroleum drums, bridges. But Egypt matched its pyramids and temples with obelisks and sphinxes, while Greece's Parthenon was glorified by the handiwork of Phidias. Michelangelo unified Florence's Piazza della Signoria with his 14-ft.-high David-which was positioned in front of the Palazzo Vecchio by a committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli...
Pudding Faces. In an artistic sense, Master E.S. was handicapped. He knew nothing of the magical discoveries in perspective being made at the time in Florence by Piero della Francesca. His was strictly a two-dimensional world. As if straining to portray flesh-and-blood emotion, he gave his people big noses, pudding faces, puffy eyelids, and the result was often close to caricature. He himself was not capable of the profound humanity expressed by Flanders' Rogier van der Weyden, nor does his dry decorative line even suggest the sublimely anguished figures of his countrymen to come...
...with her totally in-the-skin husband, unaware that a paparazzo had, in Brigitte's words, "cut a hole in the dense vegetation surrounding the swimming pool and villa." The legendarily pneumatic Bardot had more than invasion of privacy to worry about. Commented Milan's disillusioned Corriere della Sera: "One could almost fear that the nudity of Brigitte, triumphant in innumerable films, belongs to a stand...
...Rome's American Academy, Lavin revealed five new sculptures that he attributed to Bernini: a small boy with dragon, two marble putti in the Barberini chapel in the Church of Sant' Andrea della Valle, plus two portrait busts from Confraternita della Pietá (a 17th century charity hospital demolished in 1937), long forgotten in the cellar of an adjacent church. Each is stamped with the baroque characteristic of the human presence hyperpersonified, with anatomy in strain, gestures exaggerated, details made into drama...
...Florence, the tide tore through the walls of jewelers' shops on the Ponte Vecchio (built in 1345) and inundated the Piazza, della Signoria. Propelling logs and other debris, it piled autos into heaps of smashed steel and left a thick oil slick in its wake. Hundreds of rare manuscripts and books were destroyed in the slime. The water knocked out five panels of Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise," the famed bronze reliefs on the doors of the Baptistery near the Duomo. It wrecked the priceless 13th century crucifix by Cimabue in the Museum of Santa Croce...